“The Third Street Promenade Apple retail store is among the top 25 sales tax contributors to the city of Santa Monica (CA), according to a local merchant group, generated from $352 million in sales during fiscal 2011, about 12 times the per-store average for the chain worldwide,” Gary Allen reports for ifoAppleStore.

“The sales figure revelation is unusual since, like most companies, Apple closely guards individual store financial figures,” Allen reports. “In its fall on-line newsletter, the group Downtown Santa Monica (DSM) also confirms that previously anonymous and logo-less store renderings submitted to city planners earlier this year do, in fact, depict a larger replacement Apple store for the busy Third Street Promenade location, which has become too small for its daily traffic.”

The kind of success Microsoft Stores can only dream of and know they will never come remotely close to. At best they are demo stores showing you the latest crapware and underline the fact you should get to an Apple Store instead quick!.

Simply not true. Third Street is a high volume store, but it’s not delivering those numbers at the retail level. More likely, a number of enterprise or small business purchases were credited to the retail store or (in some crazy world) the information is simply wrong.

There are some ARS that do $1M per day on some days, but assuming Third Street does this daily is a huge stretch.

The daily average is derived from an annual sales figure. I don’t doubt that major company purchases went through the store versus walk-in customers, but that doesn’t change the reality of an “average daily sales” calculation. No one is saying the store sees $1 million in sales every day (although MDN’s headline may like to imply it). The sales figures are apparently taken from Santa Monica tax records, and there is absolutely no incentive for the the Apple Store to claim more sales on which they must pay a tax than there really are.

That’s $1343/minute for every minute that they are open each year (not including holidays). I’d have to see it to believe it. I work for an Apple reseller. During the iPad 2 launch, we were able to process about 2 transactions per minute (average) all day long. How a store could sustain these kinds of sales all day, every day is beyond me. They must be the Costco of Apple stores. Do the employees carry cattle prods?.

Those numbers are impossible for a retail store to do. The average Apple store is doing around $11 million a year. Some other revenue was assigned to that store but it certainly wasn’t from retail sales.

I’ve never seen or visited the Santa Monica store, but a few days ago I read another story saying that one of Apple’s New York City stores had annual sales of $400 million.

I’m skeptical of those who “know” the Santa Monica store doesn’t have $350 million in annual sales … based on their own common sense rather than hard evidence. Frequently, common sense is pretty common.

It’s not based on my own common sense. I listen to and read Apple’s quarterly results. This was taken directly from the transcript of Apple’s Q4 results: “With an average of 336 stores opened, average revenue per store was $10.7 million compared to $11.8 million in the year-ago quarter.” so I would find it hard to believe that one Apple store could do that much revenue but I just found this on Bloomberg: ” Apple’s Fifth Avenue emporium probably has annual sales of more than $350 million, topping any of the chain’s other outlets, said Jeffrey Roseman, executive vice president of real- estate broker Newmark Knight Frank Retail in New York. The location is 10,000 square feet, putting its sales per square foot at a minimum of $35,000, based on Roseman’s estimate.”

So perhaps it is true. Those are truly staggering numbers for one retails store location to do.